Accessibility Matters^™ Episode 13: Lori Samuels

Transcript for Interview with Lori Samuels, Accessibility Director, NBC Universal, and speaker for AccessibilityPlus 2021.

John Griffin: Lori, let me start where I commonly do with most of the guests. How did you get here? How did you come to the ground now that you're standing on terms of accessibility and disability?

Lori Samuels: Great question. So, disability awareness, I guess is sort of been baked into my DNA from an early age. My sister has cerebral palsy and she's my older sister. And growing up, I guess I saw firsthand the kinds of discrimination and segregation that she faced in her life. Specifically, for example, my brothers and I attended Boston Public Schools. This of course, was all prior to the Americans with Disabilities Act being passed into law in 1990. So, we which was many decades prior to that. And my sister attended a different school which was just for children with disabilities. So, she was segregated and she was separate and her experience was different than my experience or my brother's experiences.

And also, even just things like we would go to a restaurant as a family and people would turn to my mother to ask what would she like to eat? Speaking about my sister. Well, my sister was perfectly capable of letting people know what she'd like to eat. But those automatic assumptions about people with disabilities as being somehow less capable was something saw firsthand about my sister. So, that foundation was there I in college majored in computer science at Boston University. I graduated with a bachelor's in master's degree in computer science because I love math and I actually really love computer science.

So, I was really one of the early and few women in that field which never really bothered me very much and that was all fine. I actually had a good experience in my career. As a software engineer starting out, and about, let's see, I guess about less than 10 years into my career, I moved out to California and joined a company called BroderBund Software. Which was a large consumer software company second only to Microsoft Time. We did some big products like the Print Shop and where in the world has come in San Diego and some other fun consumer software, um multimedia CD-ROM stuff. I was a director of an Engineering at BroaderBund. And that was where I actually got into accessibility for the first time because I was looking at how children with disabilities would use our software with different types of keyboards adaptive devices that would attach to a computer. A track ball where a person could put their hand instead of using a traditional mouse.

Different adaptations of technology to work for people and kids in this case with disabilities. That got me thinking well how do we make sure that our software which my teams were building at that point, works well with these new types of adaptive devices. And that occurred to me that that we needed to follow some standards and guidelines to make sure that that happened and that's what we did. Then I started partnering with Microsoft at that stage in the early 1990s with the gentleman who was leading the accessibility API development at Microsoft for Microsoft Windows. So, we were the two mainstream software companies that started sort of collaborating on accessibility pre internet. So, that was a lot of fun.

And then, fast forward a few years to I joined into it in 2011 and I volunteered to start their enterprise accessibility program from scratch. I learned a lot and then I went on to do at Microsoft and then I got invited to do that at NBC Universal. So, that's how I got here.

John Griffin: Wow. But at least you had a pointer from very early on and that seems to be common to a lot of people in this business. I, myself, you know, I'm a lifetime publisher. When this project was put in front of me, I didn't hesitate for a single minute. I have an autistic grandchild. I've seen what the challenges are in being associated and affiliated and you always get a different perspective when the hammer hits your thumb. It's not quite the same when you're an outsider. Once you move inside that circle and understand it a bit, it changes your whole perspective.

Lori Samuels: Yeah. And I think that's the important thing about disability. It's part of the human experience. My sister was born with a disability. I am aging into disability. My daughter is on the autism spectrum also and this impact’s one in three households in the United States. So, why is it not a bigger topic? Why is it, why don't we talk about it more? Why don't we see more of this in media? Why is our society still as inaccessible as it is? Why is the digital world still as inaccessible as it is? Because we do have some really big numbers here. so, I think this is something where it's exciting to talk to people in publishing and media we need to draw more attention to this. And our society has advanced certainly from the time when I was a child, my sister and I were growing up but not far enough. We have a long way still to go.

John Griffin: Just a personal philosophy of mine. My intuition, my instinct tells me that from its very beginnings. Accessibility and accommodation to persons needing accessibility has one public relations image related issue, one big speed bump. And that is that when it comes to business, the idea I believe is that by making accommodations, you're interrupting potentially interrupting capitalism.

Lori Samuels: Mm hmm.

John Griffin: It's gonna cost me something. It's gonna do, and I'm not arguing that you get a free ticket in to a business that has to do the accommodations. That's not the argument.

Lori Samuels: Yeah.

John Griffin: But the argument that you can eliminate rectifying that. You know, that's not an argument either.

Lori Samuels: No and here's the thing, I mean, first of all, there's a ton of misinformation and misconception around that employee accommodation space. Most accommodations cost less than $50 a year. I mean, 85% of them. It's really not a high cost and what's the cost of not having employees with disabilities in your workforce. First of all, you do have employees with disabilities. They just haven't told you if they don't feel comfortable if they don't feel supported in your culture. People with disabilities have a lot of talent to bring to the table and problem-solving capabilities, innovation. Many, many, many of our innovations come from solving for disability on some level of whether it's text messaging or touchscreen phones, the touchscreen on Your iPhone or Android phone came out of a company that was working on a very light pressure keyboard.

And I'm forgetting the name of the company. I apologize for that, but they were designing a keyboard that would require very little resistance or touch pressure for people with disabilities to be able to operate a keyboard. Apple bought that company, that became the basis for the touchscreen that we have today on our devices. So, again, text messaging was designed for people who are deaf. There's a ton of innovation in the disability space. There's a ton of products that were started out designing for the quote unquote edge cases of disability. And then surprisingly having all kinds of usefulness for everyone and you can even take the example of the curb cut. When you talk about cost, this is the example I like to use with companies that are worried about, it's gonna cost me a lot of money.

Okay, here's the thing. Imagine if you had a concrete company and SMN company and your job was to pour sidewalks, right. There’re two scenarios. You go and you pour the sidewalk in the frame and you forget completely that you were supposed to put a curb cut in that sidewalk. So, you got to come, bring your crew back out, get the jackhammers out, after the fact and report the cement, that's expensive. You now have paid your crew twice to do the job that you should have paid them to do once. Well, that's what accessibility is like. If you do the job upfront. If you put the time and effort into being thoughtful and inclusive when you design your products or your content, and make that experience or that content accessible.

You only have to do that once. And that doesn't cost a whole. It doesn't cost a lot more to do it right. It cost some time to learn. You have to educate yourselves about and you have to bring people with disabilities into that creative process but it doesn't cost more to do it right and do it accessible. It cost a lot more to fix it after the fact.

John Griffin: Well, I mean, one of the things you have to include into that too is the market for the disabled. The demographic is stunning. There are very, very few. Business wanted to be only opportunistic.

Lori Samuels: Yeah.

John Griffin: There you go. You wanna expand your market? How about 60+ million just here in the US?

Lori Samuels: Absolutely and there are folks who have pointed out and rightly so that disability affects people in different ways. Of course, it's not a monolithic community. Some people with disabilities can watch movies and consume content or do their banking on digitally with no accessibility issues or problems. So, that's true but you have also have to factor in not only, are you building better experiences if you build them to be accessible? You're and you're getting more people into your market share to do that as a customer base. But you're also affecting the people who love them, the people who care about them. And especially as what we're seeing in sort of Gen X and millennial space generationally, this is a generation that cares more about socially conscious brands.

So, you build your brand value, frankly by investing in accessibility. There's some great research out here and data on companies that lean into disability, inclusion, and accessibility outperform their peer companies So, the data all supports it. It's sort of common sense. You know, doing good is good business.

John Griffin: It's assured business. I mean, one of the silver linings that came out of this pandemic was that the disabled got through it just as well as I did, just as well as you did. It was hard. It was tough. It was tough for everybody but they found a way. They're incredible problem solvers. They have to it. They don't necessarily have to be but they have to be.

Lori Samuels: Right.

John Griffin: They're confronted with issues that the everyday person doesn't ever come in touch with.

Lori Samuels: I will say just kind of touch on the pandemic. I mean, certainly, there was both progress and challenge in all of that, of course. For folks who are deaf and hard of hearing, everybody wearing a mask is difficult if you're relying on lip reading as part of how you communicate with others. So, that led to the creation of some clear masks and things like that. On the digital side of the world, I think it was clear that digital accessibility kind of had its field day in the sense that everyone realized, wow, we're using all these tools to go to school, to go to work, And all of a sudden, like these tools have to be more accessible. Zoom, added live added captioning capabilities initially only in the paid version of Zoom. And then from by pressure on the from the community, they said, okay, yep, that's right. It should be free for everybody. So, they corrected that what was maybe a misstep initially saying, well, we're just gonna, you know, you have to pay for this. No, you shouldn't have to pay for it. Everybody should have access to captions.

Microsoft Teams has captions and recording transcripts. So, these tools have improved. We've certainly seen that well, most of corporate America was somewhat resistant to the idea of working from home as even as an accommodation for people with disabilities. And then all of a sudden, the non-disabled community, majority had to do that everything pivoted and we made it happen really fast. Which did not go unnoticed in the disability community like, ‘Hey, I've been asking for that for a long time and you told me you couldn't do it’. So, I do hope that the businesses will recognize the need to remain flexible in this space and that part of attracting and retaining disabled talent is to allow for the possibility of people working from home. But frankly, I think that applies to any talent actually that you open up your talent pool if you can recruit from anywhere instead of just specific, usually rather expensive locations like New York or San Francisco.

So, personally, I think its smart business and as someone who works remotely all the time, I guess I have a bias. But I think its smart business to continue allowing for teams and individuals to interact this way. It's working better than maybe people thought it could. For a lot of roles, not for everything, of course.

John Griffin: Lori, you have converted a very high-level education into a career, into a life. You've become a citizen of the world and so forth. Is education today lagging behind again going back to the pandemic? I think that the organizational moors that were founded in the last great century. Followed a pandemic. You go back 100 years to this time, business, huge business grew up after you know, it flipped starting with 1919 and moving forward. Now it's 100 years later. You got to change the playbook. So, the playbook's changing.

Lori Samuels: Right.

John Griffin: But education, is education in tune with that? Are they in step with it?

Lori Samuels: Not in my humble opinion. So, first of all again, maybe comparing in my lifetime, my sister's experience of being segregated and separated, not attending public schools. Fast forwarding a couple generations to my kids, attending public schools, and interacting with and being friends with kids with disabilities. So, that's good. So, in that sense, we have certainly moved forward on public education in this country to some extent. I don't think people realize how inaccessible much of it is and still how non-include of it is. It's one thing to say public school has to have kids with disabilities in it, but it's another thing to say, yeah, but they're gonna be in a special need’s classroom and that's just gonna be off to the side and they're not actually integrated and they're not playing with.

We have a local art teacher here in my community in Logan Utah, who taught high school art and realized that the kids with disabilities were not included in his art class and he's like, well, why is that? And he started solving for that problem by creating some adaptive art equipment. So, kids could use a wheel chair and paint on the floor instead of painting on a canvas. You know, because he thought, well, that's silly. How come they're not being included? So, there's a lot of that. So, we still have a lot of segregation that's happening almost under the radar a little bit within our public-school system. We don't have any disability inclusion training in our in our public education system. We don't have any of that in our higher education system.

You can go today. So, if I, you know, I got my degree in 1985. That's a long time ago and now, you go forward to 2021. If I was getting my degree in computer science today, I would not be required to learn anything about accessibility. And yet, there's an industry demand for some knowledge of accessibility. We spend a lot of money training people in accessibility for web and mobile accessibility. Why don't we have our universities teaching this? Well, there's a whole non-profit organization called TeachAccess.org. That is trying to solve that particular problem, partnering with universities, with accreditation organizations, and with industry companies into. Microsoft is in on there, Google, all the big names in in Silicon Valley into its big partner. Working to say, hey, colleges, wake up. You should be teaching about accessibility, okay? We can't have people coming out to design and build the next generation of technology who've never heard about accessibility.

That is unacceptable. That is unacceptable, we can't keep perpetuating this problem. We have to start solving it at the source. So, for a long term solve, we've got to get our education systems teaching about accessibility teaching about inclusion. Making sure that kids with disabilities can get all the way through higher education successfully not facing barriers and they face way too many barriers today still in our education system.

John Griffin: Yeah, you're one the guest speakers at our conference and both Caroline Casey and Judy Yuman who are our keynote speakers, spoke to that issue rather loudly. Judy's position is not just at the higher level but starting down all the way down because she said, you take children going into grade school. They have grandparents. They have, they're exposed to disabilities in almost every, it's certainly at least in in a quarter of the of their families, maybe more. So, you know, it's time. It's long since passed too. So, do you think that democracy will ever come to accessibility?

Lori Samuels: I mean, look, we do face some pretty daunting problems in this country. The access to health care is a real challenge, right. We have members of our society who need personal care assistance. We have member, we have Americans who need health care, live-in health care providers in some cases. And we don't have a really good system to deliver that. So, I mean, our democracy, I mean our government has not really solved for big Scale accessibility policy. We have a good law on the books. I mean, I like the Americans with disabilities act. It did a lot and it and there's a wonderful preamble in the Americans with disabilities act about the right for people with disabilities to have full participation in society.

It isn't just the floor of you can't discriminate against people with disabilities. Full participation is a higher bar and that's what that law is intended to create. The problem is we haven't achieved that. There are tons and tons of systemic barriers, laws and policies which get in the way of people with disabilities fully participating in society. Including policies that make it difficult for someone to access the health care that they need and get the income that they need to work and live. So, in other words, there's a disincentive in our policies to actually get to allow people with disabilities to be employed, make money, and yet still get the health care that they need. That is not a problem. We as a society have solved yet and a lot of people are not aware of that problem.

But if you are a person living with a disability who has higher health care needs, your benefits will get cut off if you make too much money. Which is sort of ridiculous because you still have the health care needs and we just haven't solved that problem as a society. So, I think we have ways to go and we have different, administrations have different views on this, right. Some administrations think that yeah, the free market will just solve everything. Well, and just get rid of all the regulations. That doesn't really work. What if you have a disability and you have health care needs that, who's supposed to pay for that? Right? What do we decide as a principled society that we haven't really solved that yet?

John Griffin: You've been around it a long time, all your life. How do you compare the state of disability today in 2021 compared to what you knew it was like when you think exposed to it?

Lori Samuels: I think there's a lot of reason for optimism and for hope in this space. I think particularly coming from the generation of younger people with disabilities, those born after the ADA who are kind of looking around saying, ‘Wait a second, this is my civil right, goddamn it. And I'm gonna demand that I have access. I'm not gonna sit back and be content with anything less than that’. So, you have some awesome advocates, people out there like Alice Long and Emily Letau and Wendy Lou and a few others and I'm not mentioning everybody, but some great, some people writing and publishing and speaking up. Great voices getting out there that are kind of beating the drum around this messaging, which is we're people with disabilities. We're here to stay and society needs to become more accessible.

There's a social model of disability which the World Health Organization has adopted now, which says that essentially that people are not disabled by virtue of their physical condition but rather by the inaccessible experiences and environments that they encounter. So, the disability isn't necessarily as being a wheelchair user, it's coming up to a building and not having a ramp to get inside. So, it shifts the burden of responsibility onto society, onto the people creating products, onto the people creating technology, onto the people creating buildings, and designing infrastructure. I hope that as a country, consider our infrastructure investments that we consider making sure that our infrastructure is accessible to people with disabilities because that's table stakes. We need to get there.

John Griffin: It's kind of a zero-sum game. All inventiveness, all innovation, all science, all discovery, everything that happens for disability stops. If there is no accessibility. There has to be a transmission. There has to be a transparence of the benefit. It's got to go from thought to application to product use to scientific use. All these inventions, all of these innovations, they have to go someplace. And without being made accessible, they stop.

Lori Samuels: Well, I would say the other encouraging thing that's happening now is happening at a very global scale. So, outside of just the United States, we're seeing and you Caroline Casey as a guest speaker for your conference coming up. The founder of the Valuable 500. The Valuable 500 is a 500 global company membership organization which has commitment from the CEOs of each of those global businesses to take a leadership position in disability inclusion and accessibility. That is a global movement. That's gonna really spark something and what's even more exciting is that in partnership with the new initiative started by the International Paralympic Committee called, We the 15. Which is another global consortium of organizations, sports in this case combining with business.

So, you've got the power of sports, the power of business, leadership coming together at a global scale to change the conversation and most importantly, the action around disability, inclusion, equity, and accessibility. That I am very optimistic and excited for. I wanna be around long enough to see impact of this global movement.

John Griffin: That brings me back to you. I didn't do this in advance. So, I'm gonna ask you to describe for me what your responsibility is across NBC Universal.

Lori Samuels: Sure. Yeah, so I work with so NBC Universal has a number of different companies and brands and businesses all sort of under this umbrella. Which is under an even larger umbrella of Comcast NBC Universal. So, I have the pleasure of working with all of these different businesses including our parks, the Universal Orlando and Hollywood and we just opened up one in Beijing. And of course, NBC Sports which hosted the Olympics and Paralympics and we'll be hosting the Super Bowl next year along with our entertainment division and our news division, MSNBC's, NBC News, and CNBC, just to name the big ones. So, I get to Work really with all of our digital product teams within those businesses to help educate, inspire, motivate, and improve accessibility of our content and our products and that's one big focus.

Another big focus is working just internally on our competency and cultural competency around disability inclusion. Hiring people with disabilities. I'm one of the global advisers for our disability focused employee resource group. And we plan a lot of events and kind of educational materials for that. And then, I also work on the scope of accessibility for our employee-facing tools as well.

John Griffin: Lori Samuels, you would be hard pressed to find somebody with more energy with more singular focus in accessibility, or with more of a diverse community of involvement products in a major corporation that is a media giant across the globe. That summarizes this visit and tells you something a little bit about why accessibility matters. I'm John Griffin. I'm the publisher of accessibility.com. Thank you for being with us.

Lori Samuels: Thank you, John.